The Change Back
by Quibbloboy
Summary: The common North American red-tailed hawk has an average lifespan of less than twenty years. It's been a long time since the war ended, and suddenly Cassie gets a visit from an old friend. One-shot. Almost canon-compliant; just imagine Tobias didn't go with in the climax of 54, or he survived somehow. ;)


With a faint _pop_ , the lamp illuminating my desk went out all at once. In sudden, total darkness, I cursed - fumbled around momentarily for my phone, but it was plugged in in the next room, charging next to my bed. I didn't like to be distracted when I worked late.

I stood up and felt my way along the wall until my fingers bumped into the switch for the overhead light.

"Aha," I muttered. But as I moved to click the room light on, already wondering if I even had another lamp lightbulb floating around anywhere, something caught my attention. A vague sort of _tap tap_ sound, coming from the window behind me and to my right. I turned and squinted out into the shadowy light cast by streetlamps and dimmed by the live oak outside my study window.

There he was. So much the way I remembered him, and yet so different at the same time. The same fierce, unrelenting gaze; same wicked, curved beak and tearing talons; same splash of red tail feathers beneath tawny brown. But there was something else about him now - something feeble, haggard. Bits of grayish white poked through the woody brown of his wings and head, and he was much skinnier than I remembered. I also noticed, with a start, that there was a milky whitish quality to his prized hawk eyes. He was going blind. He pecked weakly at the glass, not at all like the bird that had once smashed my bedroom window when I was a little girl.

Forgetting all about the light now, I stepped towards the window in a trance, hardly daring to breathe.

‹Hey, Cassie,› said Tobias.

* * *

"How long were you out there?" I asked, watching Tobias preen his whitening feathers.

‹Not too long. Maybe five minutes? I wasn't exactly keeping track,› he said.

"Why didn't you say anything?" I demanded. "I would have come right away." A snow-white feather drifted down to the desk he was perched on and landed on top of whatever I'd been working on earlier. Tobias cocked his head at me - maybe that was his hawk approximation of a shrug.

‹I didn't want to startle you,› he said simply.

There was so much I wanted to say, to ask. How many years had it been since I'd last heard from him - since anyone had heard from him - fifteen, eighteen? Was he eating right? Where was he living?

Did he still think about Rachel as much as I did?

Instead, I blurted out, "So how are you?"

Yikes. My small-talk skills had rusted over a bit.

Tobias stopped preening and laughed easily in my head.

‹Actually, Cassie, that's kinda what I came to talk to you about.›

I just looked at him, confused.

‹Cassie... I think I'm dying.›

No sooner had the words left his head than another white feather settled to rest beside the first.

* * *

"Well, you're definitely underweight. Given the problems you're having with hunting, that's to be expected. Your eyes are shot. Physically, you're a lot weaker than you used to be." I ran through my diagnosis clinically, professionally. It was weird: this was how I usually spoke to people about their sick cats and dogs. I wasn't used to addressing my patient for this part. "I'm sure you've noticed your feathers lightening in color, your grip strength going downhill - not to mention your eyesight," I added, as kindly as I could. He sat quietly through all of this.

"You're an old bird, Tobias," I said, flipping shut my notepad. "You... _are_ dying." To my surprise, this news didn't seem to phase him. He just shuffled his wings a little bit and cocked his head at me again.

‹Had to happen some time, didn't it?› he said. But then, maybe the casual response was just an act, or at least partially, because some of the brusqueness fell away when he said, ‹So, how long do you think I have?›

I shook my head. He was trying to sound tough and offhand. Well, I'd let him think I believed it. "Not long, I would say. Out in the wild, you'd be lucky to survive a month. Frankly, I'm surprised you've managed to support yourself by hunting even this long."

Tobias looked down and away. He didn't say anything. What had I... hunting?

"Oh, Tobias," I said, the pieces coming together. "You haven't been hunting, have you?" I wasn't able to keep the sympathy out of my voice, and I cringed - he'd surely hear it as pity.

"Roadkill?" I asked. He ruffled his feathers uncomfortably.

‹Well, that's not important. What's important is keeping me going, right? So is there - is there some sort of hawk tonic I can take? Some Beaka Seltzer or something?›

"No," I said simply.

A long silence stretched out between us.

‹No,› he repeated. I shook my head. "No."

He really was an old bird. Everything dies eventually.

"You're free to stay here with me as long as you'd like - Affie and I would love the company," I said, tossing a glance at Affie snoozing peacefully in his cat bed.

‹Oh no, I couldn't impose like that-›

"It's no trouble at all! Please, I'll set up a nice perch for you, we can talk and catch up, it'll be great! And besides..." Would it be manipulative to add what I was thinking? Maybe, but I wanted to be sure Tobias was safe. I pressed on. "Besides, there's got to be competition in your old meadow now, right? That's the way it goes. Young hawks crowd out the old ones."

Again, Tobias was silent. I knew I'd guessed correctly.

"No more roadkill," I said softly.

‹Okay,› he said finally. ‹No more roadkill.›

* * *

Tobias and I caught up in the following weeks. He told me where he'd been staying, what he'd been doing, and I told him about my work. Though he started out a little cagey (Who knows? Maybe I did too) it wasn't long before we were as close and as comfortable as we'd ever been. He even got over his initial leeriness of Affie when he realized the cat was much too fat and lazy to ever take a swipe at him. I always left the window open for Tobias to come and go as he pleased, not wanting him to feel trapped, but he began spending most of his time in the house anyway.

But as time went on, Tobias's condition worsened.

He started losing more and more feathers, and I began to pick up on a faint rattling wheeze in his breathing patterns. His health was a definite elephant in the room. Even more an elephant than that, though, was the obvious solution to the problem. Somehow I hadn't felt quite right bringing it up that first night. Maybe I didn't want to bring back memories of fighting, of the war - even of Rachel.

But one night, as Tobias and I were talking, I noticed him wavering a bit on his perch - soon, he fluttered down to the ground, as casually as if nothing were wrong.

"...What are you doing?" I asked, trying to keep my voice nonchalant.

‹Figured I'd try out a change of scenery. Everything's so tall from down here! You should try it sometime. Check it out, Affie at eye-level! Affie in marvelous 3D!›

He was trying too hard. I knew he wasn't telling the truth. Oftentimes, when birds get very sick, they'll opt to sit on the ground rather than waste energy trying to balance on their perch.

I could ignore the elephant no longer.

"Tobias... there is a way out of this, you realize."

A beat.

‹Yeah,› he said heavily. ‹Yeah, I do.› We both just sat there quietly for a minute, while Affie purred and knocked his big, soft head up against Tobias.

‹But, jeez, Cassie, I haven't morphed in... I don't know, fifteen years. More, probably.›

"You can't keep going like this," I said. "It won't last." I didn't want to sound like I was pressuring him, urging him to do something he was afraid of. It was almost funny how he was staring death in the face, and yet it was the idea of a simple morph that scared him.

‹I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it,› Tobias said.

* * *

It was raining. Sounds like a dumb cliche, doesn't it? But it's true - there was rain _pitter-pattering_ on the roof when it happened. I was working quietly at my desk. Tobias hadn't said much all night. He was up, clutching valiantly to his perch, but swaying terribly.

All of a sudden, I heard a rustling and a soft thump. I turned.

Tobias lay on the floor, his breathing coming in short, ragged gasps.

"Tobias!" I cried. I jumped off of my chair and ran to kneel beside him. I picked him up tenderly and cradled him in my arms. He was shivering.

"Tobias," I said again, more calmly. "Talk to me. Are you conscious?" His eyes were lazy, unfocused.

‹Oog... Cassie, I... I don't feel good. This is... oh man. This is bad.›

"Tobias. It's time."

He paused briefly, then he nodded his hawk head up and down.

‹Yeah,› he agreed. Then he made a noise in my head - I don't know if he did it on purpose, or if he even knew he did it at all - a low, keening sort of sound that pierced me to my core.

I knew part of it was fear of the unknown. Funny how after all this time, it was his human body that was strange and scary to him. But at the same time, it was a sound of terrible sadness for the loss of the body he'd spent most of his life in: loss of his powerful hawk's eyes, loss of the predator's strength in his beak and talons, and most of all, the loss of flying, soaring up and away from the earth, up to the tops of buildings and above, free from all the troubles and pains of life on the ground.

And then, Tobias began to change.

Talons thickened and split off to form toes. His legs stretched out and out, then began to widen into the more powerful legs of a human. His wings bulged forward, filling out with muscle and bone and tendons that were all alien to the hawk's body. He began to grow. He grew heavier in my lap as I watched old feathers flatten and melt away into mere outlines, fierce hawk eyes widen and reshape to form gentle human eyes. His beak softened and ran, eroding into his face to form lips and a nose, and I noticed small stubs of ears poke out the sides of his head and begin to widen. The feather patterns that were all that was left of his old hawk body gave way to the morphing suit that he'd managed to incorporate into his human morph all those years ago, maintained in Andalite stasis or Z-space or wherever it went when he wasn't using it.

And then, just like that, I was holding a human boy in my lap. Tobias blinked in the low light and peered up at me.

"Welcome back," I whispered, tears in my eyes.

* * *

"How old is that guy now, anyway?"

"Well, see, he's actually like thirty... thirty something. Early thirties. It's just that his body is only thirteen."

"Huh? That doesn't make sense."

"Well, no, not really. It's just some weird side-effect of the morphing power, I guess. He spent a bunch of time as a hawk."

Word had gotten out that Tobias - _the_ Tobias - had resurfaced. Nobody seemed to quite know all the details, but most people knew some of them, anyway. I didn't bother to correct them when I overheard conversations like this in the next aisle at the supermarket.

I squinted at two different cans of beans, then shrugged and dropped both into my cart so Tobias could have his pick. He wasn't quite a vegetarian, but since he'd made the transition back to human, he had had a pretty significant interest in all non-meat food items. I tried to keep the pantry stocked with anything I thought he might like.

"You could always come with. Pick out your own foods, whatever you want. I'm always afraid I'm gonna get something you don't like," I'd said that morning, while Tobias had lounged on the couch reading a book. He smiled and shrugged.

"Nah, there's no real danger of that. Everything tastes interesting with a human tongue. I'm beginning to understand how Ax felt," he'd said, and we both laughed. "Besides, I don't really like the crowds." He turned a page and marveled, as he always seemed to do, at the ease and versatility of human fingers.

He'd done okay after his final morph. I was worried that he would be depressed, missing his eyes and his wings, but he'd had some time to adjust to those losses in those final few weeks anyway - nearly blind, and generally too weak to fly much in the first place. Plus, hands were always a welcome improvement.

I pushed the shopping cart down the aisle and was about to turn away from the voices I'd heard, when something drifted over that made me pause.

"Apparently he always could have turned back into a person, but for some reason he never did."

"Yeah, I've heard that, too - has he ever said why?"

"Nope. He's never really done interviews like the others did. Makes sense, I suppose-"

"Well, yeah, if he's been M.I.A. since the war ended."

"Flying is supposed to be really, really cool. Honestly, sometimes I wish I could morph _just_ so I could try flying. They say it's, like... totally freeing."

"Maybe that's why he stuck to the hawk morph all these years."

"Maybe."

"But with the war behind him now... I dunno, now that his hawk body is gone... I mean, that was his last reminder. The last thing tying him to all the bad memories. Now it's like he's free in a whole new way."

I pushed my shopping cart around the corner, smiling wide, feeling more genuine joy than I had in all the time since Tobias had made the change back.

Yeah. He really was free, now, wasn't he?

Free.


End file.
